The current feedback system seems to reward buyers who are constantly changing to a NEW seller to purchase a NEW disc or set of discs with EVERY single transaction and vice versa if the buyer leaves positive feedback for the new seller. In my opinion that doesn't remotely model the real world.
In the real world if a person is happy with a transaction then it seems perfectly logical they would return to the same seller and buy more. Both the buyer and seller should reap the rewards for good customer service and loyalty. In the current system they are heavily penalised for doing so AND if they also use the best offers facility they get 0 feedback since each one is regarded as a single transaction. Likewise the good seller is equally penalised.
You had previously given some reasons why you implemented the feedback system the way it is currently as:
1) It gives a higher emphasize on keeping consistently good behavior with different people.
2) It lowers the probability of collusion between buyer/seller to artificially increase counter through several small transactions.
3) It lowers the probability of a buyer setup'ing a seller's shop on only carry transaction with him/herself to create inflated feedback counter and then scam people away based on it.
I think in practice none of these actually stand up to close scrutiny.
As I've demonstrated it doesn't give higher emphasis to a buyer who returns to the same seller or vice versa. In fact it does the exact opposite - it actually lowers the emphasis and encourages the buyer to shop elsewhere since their total feedback count will rise far faster by switching to another seller as they will always get at least 1 positive feedback! My feedback confirms this.
Has there been a single case of anyone (even cararte
) attempting to be a buyer of their own discs to increase their feedback count? I seriously doubt anyone would have the time or patience to do this and if they did it would be easy to spot from information like country, address or ipaddress etc. Don't you do checks on all of us before we setup shops anyway?
I also haven't met a single seller yet who tried to bribe me to purchase more from them in order to gain more positive feedbacks. That has to be one of the weakest reasons I can think of. Money talks in my world....not feedbacks!
I don't doubt the current feedback algorithm involved some interesting mathematical programming but the end result is pure fantasy. I think a simpler algorithm would have sufficed in this case and been a much closer approximation to reality.